A Timeless Beauty

Sofia Gubaidulina - Offertorium
Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
Arvo Pärt - Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
Arvo Pärt - Berlin Mass

Tõnu Kaljuste conductor
Sergej Krylov violin
London Philharmonic Choir
London Philharmonic Orchestra

When Arvo Pärt’s music began to be heard outside Estonia two decades ago, it felt like the opening of a door into another world. Pärt’s devastating purity, stillness and resonance connected the distant past to the absolute present while seeming to wipe the musical slate clean of all needless excess, noise and argument. It seemed, for a moment, as though this penetrating music could silence the world. In this concert conducted by the composer’s champion Tõnu Kaljuste, we hear four seminal pieces by Pärt alongside a violin concerto by Sofia Gubaidulina that owes much to Pärt’s work in its ‘total surrender of the self to the tone’.

Free pre-concert event | 6.00pm–6.45pm | Royal Festival Hall
LPO Foyle Future Firsts, conducted by Ben Gernon, present a programme to include Galina Ustvolskaya’s final work – Symphony No. 5 (Amen), a haunting setting of The Lord’s Prayer.

Supported by the Estonian Embassy in London